Renaming

Which brings me to something I notice constantly and have never seen properly explained: the extraordinary rate at which the language of work churns while the underlying ideas stay still.

Morale became job satisfaction became engagement became, latterly, thriving and belonging. Suggestion schemes became continuous improvement became kaizen became innovation culture. The personnel department became human resources became people and culture, and in one organisation I worked with, briefly and gloriously, the Department of Talent. Sensitivity training became T-groups became encounter became away-days became offsites. Time and motion became work study became business process re-engineering became operational excellence became, with the addition of software, workforce optimisation.

There is a lazy explanation for this — consultants need new products — and it is partly true but too cynical to be interesting. Something else is going on as well. Each renaming is an attempt to escape the connotations that have accumulated on the previous term. Engagement was invented, in part, because job satisfaction had come to sound like the employee’s business rather than the employer’s. Wellbeing was reached for because stress had become legally and medically loaded — say stress in a British organisation and you are within one step of the Health and Safety Executive and two of an employment tribunal. Wellbeing carried no such freight, which was the point, and now it does, and something else will be needed.

Words in organisations wear out. They wear out because they are used, and using them attaches them to the history of what was done under their name, and that history is rarely flattering. A term arrives clean, does five years of useful work, absorbs the disappointments of every programme launched under it, and is retired. Then the idea underneath it, which never changed, is reissued.

The practical consequence for anyone trying to think clearly about work is that you must translate constantly. When a client tells me they have an engagement problem, my first job is to find out which of about nine possible situations they are in, since the word covers all of them: people are leaving; people are staying and doing the minimum; a survey score fell; a director read something; two teams hate each other; the work is awful; the pay is bad; there was a restructure eighteen months ago that nobody has recovered from; or nothing at all is wrong and somebody needs a project.

from A Guide to Occupational Psychology: People, Work and Organisations in the Modern UK (2026)